Feedback on Import function

AustrianBanker

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Feb 19, 2021
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Just starting out here with MotivWave (on Linux). I decided to look at basic functionality first just to get a feeling whether I would click with the software.

Getting some data in was a good start I thought, so I decided to give it a spin, importing long term historical data from Nasdaq.

Nasdaq seem to do a good job at obfuscating data so their CSV output is quite funky and do need some hand mangling to get in.

Nasdaq use ; and not , and will happily add , for thousand separators. Given that Nasdaq is pretty big I'd thought a direct capability to import a CSV file in the format Nasdaq produces could be expected to be basic functionality in MW?

After that I hit the obscurities of MW.

First, there are two places where you can import data and they work very differently. From a UI/UX perspective it is completely opaque to the user that this is different.

So you select Configure/Instruments/Import and point it to your CSV file and suddently you have a zillion new instruments with dates as symbols. No way to undo it, no warnings etc.

That should be fixed.

Then the other way is of course File/Chart/Import Data. If the user finds it, then it is still a complete hit and miss job to get it functioning because there is very little control of the process.

And when you succeed that's when it gets really interesting. You find yourself with a chart window with no data at all. Nothing to display here it says and then no idea how to find any. After some looking it seems it is way off XY scales and no idea how that happened. Other thing I noticed was that right click on the imported chart to add something to the chart and suddenly the data would vanish and go back to the rather incomplete set MW knew about. That was frustrating because it was totally non intuitive.

Finally I was having some success, when I realised that for long index export runs you might find that the first values in the data set are integers (since many indexes might start at a 100 for example).

Somehow this confuses MW very much so, so that that is why you end up with very funky charts. To fix it, I changed the entry values to floats (100 -> 100.00) and hey presto I could import the data.

I really think you guys need to work on this a lot more, because when I try to work with free data sources I see the same issues popping up.

Of course I have no intention to work this way longer term if I migrate to MW, but I still think being able to add large amounts of historical data is an essential basic capability of any tool such as MW.

Regards,

AB
 
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